Questions of General and Comparative Literature [ LFLTR2230 ]

Site ICampus course at : http://www.icampus.ucl.ac.be/

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1. Introduction to the history of the discipline, its theoretical framework, methodologies and subfields through the teaching of specific research instruments.

2. Provide an example of a completed study in comparative literature.

Analyze one period and one or more streams of European literature using a comparative perspective. Provide students with a basic understanding of this period and streams of literature, placing the latter in the broader context of the connections that European culture has progressively established across different countries, constituting a unique civilization sharing common evidence, references and connivances. Familiarize students with the aims, essence and methodologies of comparative research, and introduce them to the theoretical foundations of the comparative approach. Students are expected to demonstrate that they have acquired the skills taught during the course and that they have mastered the historical background and literary material characterizing the period and the streams of literature analyzed throughout the course.

The evaluation of this course will be an oral exam constituted of two parts:
1) a part which will focus on the content of lectures and required readings;
2) a part which will focus on the content of the individual comparative reading written paper.

1) Lecture
2) Writing of an individual comparative reading paper to be presented during the oral exam

The Double : figures, stories, poetry will be the focus of the 2013-2014 general and comparative literature course. Representations of the double and the stories of duplicity abound in literary history and suppose different paradigms (doppelgänger, double, mirror, clone etc). This course will outline a systematization (chronological, thematic and theoretical) of this notion, through a number of authors clearly related to the literary tradition of the double (including Stevenson, Meyrink and Borges). This comparative analysis will allow both to reconstruct a possible history of the double in its meanings and typologies and to apprehend the concept of duplicity.

Required readings

BORGES Jorge Luis, Fictions, traduit de l'espagnol par Nestor Ibarra, Paul Verdevoye et Roger Caillois, Paris, Gallimard, 1974 (Folio), 192 p.

MEYRINK Gustav, Le Golem, présentation et traduction par Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, Paris, Flammarion, 2003 (GF), 321 p.

STEVENSON Robert Louis, L'Etrange Cas du docteur Jekyll et de M. Hyde, préface de J.-B. Pontalis, texte traduit et annoté par Charles Ballarin, Paris, Gallimard, 2003 (Folio), 171 p.

A short list of literary stories on the double will be posted in the online ressources after the introductory class. In this list, each student will choose a text to be compared with one of the required readings. This exercise will consist in the production of an individual comparative reading written paper.

The required reading may also be read in the original language if the linguistic skills of each student permit.